Our next presenter is Jack Lifton, Senior Advisor of Energy Fuels, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange American under the symbol UUUU, as well as the TSX under the symbol EFR. Welcome back, Jack.
Okay. I am going to try and give a brief description today of the most important company none of you have ever heard of. Okay? Energy Fuels has been processing uranium ore into yellowcake for 40 years. Its location is 70 mi from the state of Stagecoach, okay, Monument Valley, Utah, which is slightly west of Newark. Okay? If you have ever been there, it is the reason you can process uranium. There is nothing there. Half the workers are either Ute or Navajo people. Okay? The workers are absolutely in favor of enlarging the facility. The elders of their tribes are pro. Okay? In any case, recently, a specialty metal company has been described as an American national champion. Okay? I am not going to mention the name of the company, and I certainly do not agree with that title because it belongs to Energy Fuels.
That's our national champion. It is by far the largest producer of yellowcake in the United States. And perhaps, as far as I know, there is no other producer. Okay? Because the site, the mill, that processes uranium ore has its residue, thorium, very, very directive. And thorium decay products include radium, which you'll all recognize. That's something you want done next year. So, I've been there. Some of the people here have been there. It's a very nice facility, very modern. And as a man who was born before the nuclear age, I can tell you that it is state of the art. That's true. I have to think about older kids. Okay. Anyway, I only want to show this one slide because I have a cynical comment. None of you really looks at all these slides. There's too much data on them.
The slides that this company usually uses are so dense with data that even I do not read them. Okay? In a few seconds on the screen, you are not going to pay any attention. Okay? Let us just look at the overall picture here. Now, let us see. Assuming I can read this. Excuse me. A leading producer. That is comical. It is the leading producer. Where is there something coming up? I will tell you in a second. Heavy mineral sands. I will explain that to you in a second. Okay. As I said before, some of you heard here, the United States is the world's largest user of uranium. We have the largest fleet of civilian power reactors in the world. We have 94 active power units in the United States, which are nuclear power units. We use 36 million pounds of yellowcake a year to fuel those reactors.
We produce much less than 2 million pounds a year. That is a problem. Now, I do not understand why people are not aware of this, but I think that the anti-nuclear bias has caused you to just close your minds to this. We do not care. Shut that. I do not remember the name of the plant. Okay. Shut that down because we can use candles and kerosene lamps. It does not make any difference for environmentalists. Right. In fact, there is no urban area not served by nuclear power. For your information, Los Angeles got the majority of its power from a nuclear plant in Arizona. All those great environmentalists, they draft their documents by nuclear power light. Okay?
The problem is, like Mesa Energy Fuels, fuel is produced by specialist companies that convert the yellowcake to uranium metal and then separate the active crystal material, U-235, which is less than 1% of the uranium, into an increased portion of the uranium rod. I believe it's more than 20% power use. Okay? In the United States, we have a number of companies that are saying, "We have found uranium just north of the Gypsy, and there's a garbage dump, and there's uranium under it." This is a different story. Sorry, maybe it's not the Gypsy. Could be Tuscaloosa. Okay. Wyoming's got a lot of uranium. Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico have uranium. Montana has uranium. And of course, Saskatchewan and another country have a lot of uranium. Okay? Energy Fuels has mines in all those places other than Saskatchewan. Okay?
Of course, it produces a 1 million- 1,200,000 pounds of yellowcake in those mines. One of them in Arizona is the highest-grade uranium mine anywhere in the Americas. It is currently being brought back into production by Energy Fuels and will double their capacity within 24 months. I can tell you off the record, and I will not admit that I ever said this. The governor of one of the states, the state in which this mine is, said to the president of Energy Fuels last year, "I demand that you not open this mine." The president of Energy Fuels said, "Okay." He said, "I want you to sell me. I will sell you the mine for the net present value because you are confiscating it without authority of law and constitution.
The governor said, "What's the price?" He said, "$2 billion." The governor said, "Maybe $1 billion." Okay? I want to point out that mine is literally worth $2 billion. It's the property of Energy Fuels. You'll never see that in the balance sheet. Okay? What is the value of all these properties Energy Fuels owns that can produce uranium? Some of them are not producing because it gets almost all of its feed from its own mines. That value is billions. It has to be. America is desperately short of uranium. You're going to say, "No, no, no. All the power plants are running." Yeah. We buy from the Russians. We buy from Kazakhstan, Australia, Canada, of course, for the moment. Okay? Though they declare us, they do not want to export to us. We burn 36 million pounds a year of uranium.
When I say burn, we use it up. And so far, I haven't heard of a power plant closing for lack of fuel. Keep your eyes open. Because other nations like China are building new reactors at 10x the speed we have. As you know, it takes 10 years to build a new reactor. And it's always 100% overrun in cost because of regulation. I believe we've opened two new reactors in the last decade. And we have 94 of them operating at economy. We're not replacing them. Okay? Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Anyway, so we need to produce as much uranium as we can in the United States. My question to the government of the United States is, do you have enough uranium, domestic uranium, to fuel the fleet, the Navy? I don't know. Okay? So we never hear about that, do we?
We talk about oil and gas and coal and solar and wind. We never hear about uranium. Yet we are dependent on it. Okay? You've never heard of Energy Fuels. Why is that? You've heard of some companies that are in other specialty materials that do not matter. You hear about them all the time. They do not matter. Energy Fuels matters. It is the national champion. We cannot do without it. If Energy Fuels closed, the United States would be in terrible shape. We'd be looking at the clock to see when we were going to run out of nuclear power. Okay? Never heard of it? Pay attention. Find out more about it. We're going to be telling you more about it this year. Okay? Because one of the problems is that the United States markets and government have completely ignored uranium. So price went down.
I think I remember it was $25 a pound or something just a few years ago. Nobody was producing uranium, including Energy Fuels. I mean, you couldn't. Their cost price was above that. Okay? Except, of course, the Russians, the Kazakhs, comical, they were not. Okay. Now the price of uranium went up, and Energy Fuels has reopened, and it has not only produced 1 million pounds, it has at least that much in inventory right now. Okay? The capacity of the mill is 8 million pounds a year, 25% of the American demand. Can it get to that level? I don't know. We really have to. If you're going to say, "This is America. We'll build 10 of those." Will you really? It's the only permitted site in the U.S. that can process radioactive ore. Only one.
If you're thinking, "This guy doesn't know about thorium," it's the largest legal thorium depositary in the United States. In other words, when they process ore, you produce uranium, and you produce the very radioactive material thorium. Thorium goes to storage. Except that the company has now been approached by a group from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, United States Department of Energy. They're proposing producing medical isotopes there from the radioactive emanations from the thorium. Thorium decays ultimately to radium. In the process, it produces isotopes that are used in cancer treatment. Okay? As a chemical engineer, I said to the management, "You think you're going to, what, grab a radium or, let's say, an actinium atom, and you're just going to put it in the bottle?" He said, "No, no. The Lawrence guys are coming out.
They're going to build a facility to separate radioisotopes. You have to understand, the medical isotopes have short lives. They have to be produced and sent to the hospital right away. We used to get them from Chalk River, Ontario. They stopped making medical isotopes. So dumb government is not just an American specialty. Okay? And Ontario is a major producer of nuclear power. I believe half of its power comes from nuclear power. A friend of mine was the president of Ontario Hydro, and I know about it. I was carefully involved when they shut Chalk River down, and we could not believe it. I mean, they shut it down as a source of medical isotopes. The U.S. is short medical isotopes. Energy Fuels is sitting there as a repository of material from which you can make medical isotopes. That's a coming business.
Don't tell anybody I said this, but the President of Energy Fuels told me he could foresee that medical isotopes was a bigger revenue earner than anything else the company was doing. That's how big a business is possible. It's got to be supported not just by private equity, by government, regulators, etc. Okay. That's two things, right? That's both involved with uranium. Third thing, the Chinese industry, rare earth industry, 10 years or 12 years ago decided they were going to use the chemical mineral monazite as a source of rare earth. Okay. Why? Because what they use now, it's called bastnasite. That's what they mine in Bayan Obo and Inner Mongolia. And that's what MP mines in California. That is 16% useful rare earths. Monazite is 24%. One little problem, monazite's radioactive. China today, monazite is 1%-2% of what's called heavy mineral sands.
Another thing you've never heard of, right? See black sand on a beach? That's heavy mineral sand. It's zirconium, titanium, and 1 % or 2% rare earths. China last year processed 6.5 million tons of heavy mineral sands. From that, they produced nearly 100,000 tons of monazite, which is 60% rare earths. Okay? Now, why did they do that? Because they're concerned that their big project in Bayanova is becoming non-economical. Heavy mineral sands are there for the taking. They produce zirconium. We import zirconium from guess where? China. Titanium, they process almost all the world's titanium. And they're getting most of it now from heavy mineral sands that they import to China National Nuclear Corporation, takes out uranium and thorium from the monazite, and it sends it to the Chinese customers. Okay? In the United States, we have exactly one company that can do that, Energy Fuels.
Energy Fuels is the only licensed repository to which you can send monazite. You can send anything anywhere for 90 days. Okay? If I want to import monazite, let's say the delicatessen on the corner, I can probably do that. Ninety days later, everybody shows up, AEC, NRC, APA. What did you do with it? You have 90 days to dispose of residues and waste. Okay? Nobody will touch monazite in the United States. Why? They could not except Energy Fuels. Okay? Energy Fuels, six years ago, bought some monazite from the American company Chemours. Chemours is a former DuPont subsidiary. They are a producer, among other things, of zircon and titanium ore. Okay? They were processing heavy mineral sands out of Georgia. They had monazite left. Yes, United States, Georgia. They had monazite leftover. What do they do with it?
The law in Florida where they were processing says, "You distribute it back into the ground so that norm, the background radiation, is the same or less as it was before." They were doing that. Along came a Chinese buyer and said, "Hey, I'll buy it." Okay. They sold it to them for, I don't know, maybe nothing, I don't know, because it was an advantage to them. It cost a lot of money to put it back in the ground. The Chinese are buying it. Along came Energy Fuels and said, "What are you guys doing?" They said, "Well, we're going to get into a problem. There's no place to put it." He said, "Gee, I've got a home for it." They said, "Well, how much do you pay?" He said, "Nothing.
I'll take it away. It wasn't exactly nothing to its close. Okay. So he had a source of monazite. And he was the only guy that could take it into the United States because he's the only guy that can process it or store it. Okay. One thing led to another. They thought that was a very good idea to go to that business because here's what they calculated. This is all public. This is what Energy Fuels calculated. If we produce heavy mineral sands, let's say in Brazil, then with a partner, maybe Chemours, they will extract the zirconium and titanium, which are payable, good market, and we get the monazite. They pay us by giving us the monazite. What's our cost of monazite? Zero. It's true. Except the freight. Okay.
Now, as an aside, I have to tell you that when the Chinese ship monazite, they usually call it potatoes, beans, or something. They do not worry about UN regulations on shipping radioactive material. Okay? They always have another name for it. Okay. We do not do that. The point is, you can ship monazite to the United States. You just cannot keep it and store it. It cannot be for your old age or something. You have to take the radioactivity out. Only one place can do that. You take out the uranium. Anything over 400 parts per million uranium is payable for Energy Fuels. Any material over 400 ppm. I know it sounds very low, but that is okay. Okay. They take some uranium out. They take the thorium out and store it. Monazite can be up to 6% thorium.
They take the thorium out and store it. What are they left with? A very high-quality rare earth mineral concentrate. I was the surveyor on the Lynas plant in Malaysia. The government hired me to see whether they should issue a license. That was 13 years, 14 years. I had access to the books of the Lynas Corporation. The Lynas plant in Australia, 20,000-ton monazite separation plant, cost $400 million to build in 2012. I do not know how much inflation these places have. That is $20 million per 1,000 tons capacity. It is a 20,000-ton plant. It is the largest dedicated rare earth separation plant in the world. Why am I telling you all this? I am getting to a point. Energy Fuels took a look at that, and nobody is going to authorize that kind of money for a product that has no market.
They built a 5,000-ton separation plant, one-fourth the size of the plant in Malaysia that Lynas built, for $17 million. Now, they had a permitted site, water, power, and workers who had been doing solvent extraction and separation method of choice for 41 years. They did not need any help. They designed the plant in-house, built it, $17 million bucks. Okay. They then produced, I think a year ago, about 50 tons of high-purity separated rare earth oxides, the material you use to make rare earth metal, the material you use to make magnesium. Okay. They found an interested customer, POSCO Korea , who are extremely confident in meeting their specs. And they sent them a ton. They said, "Fine. This stuff is great. We want to know when you can ship us hundreds of tons of like some metal in-house." Okay.
It is not going to happen right away because what Energy Fuels did was realize that Chemours could never supply anything like that. Okay. And Chemours was not from Georgia, not from the U.S.A., Georgia. Okay. They went out, took a look. They found three heavy mineral sands deposits, one in Madagascar. Where is that? Okay. As far as you can south in Africa, and then go east. Madagascar is a very big island. Okay. They found there the world's largest undeveloped supply of heavy mineral sand. Now, it has always been there. I was involved in a project like that 15 years ago. Okay. We could not do it. The people first told the company, "You cannot deal with them. You know how those South African countries are. They do not follow the rules, blah, blah, blah." Okay.
Not only did they get the deposit, they got the permit from the Madagascar government to develop the mine. Okay. How did they do that? How are they going to do that? They bought a company in Tanzania, and that company's called Base Resources, an Australian company. They're producing, revenue-generating, profitable heavy mineral sands operator with one problem. Their deposit was running out. Energy Fuels bought the company and transferred the people. They're going to now develop the Madagascar project. These are experienced heavy mineral sands miners. Chemours is going to process the zirconium and titanium out. The monazite remaining will make it the largest heavy mineral sands project in the world. That's one. Two, in Brazil, in the state of Bahia, they bought a heavy mineral sands deposit. They're developing it with some of the people from Base Resources who were left over from the African project.
In Australia, where the President of the company is from, they entered into a joint venture with a company called Astron. Astron has a deposit of heavy mineral sands in Australia called the Donald Project . What? Donald Duck, Donald Trump, the most. Okay. The point is that Astron's deposit is the richest deposit in heavy rare earth mineral sands deposit in the world. And I'm considered the expert. And I'm telling you, I've never seen anything as rich as this. I was shocked when I was shown the data because I first, the company said, "We're going to produce 250 tons a year of disposing of turbine." The key heavy minerals, I said, "From what? From the 1% contained mineral in the monazite?" They said, "Let's show you something." Couldn't believe the analysis of the book. Fantastic. One of a kind. Okay. All these three are underway.
By the end of the decade, the plan is to be processing, ready for this, 50,000 tons of monazite a year. That would give them 30,000 tons of rare earth. 50,000 tons of monazite. Only one place on earth does more than that, and they do not do it in one; they do it among a dozen companies. That is China. I was joking with somebody this morning that when the board of directors of China National Nuclear gets together, the only American company they would ever dream of talking about is Energy Fuels. They do not care about MP. They do not care about Lynas. None of those are competitors. Energy Fuels is a competitor because China is going to monazite 50% more rare earths than bastnasite. They do not like competitors. They had grabbed up most of it, and Energy Fuels got the best of the rest. Okay.
From now on, there's just two companies to be looked at in rare earths. I'm saying China National Nuclear represents all the Chinese companies. Okay. And Energy Fuels. That's rare earths. Okay. That's a coming attraction, in my opinion. By 2030, if this all happens, Energy Fuels will be the lowest-cost producer of rare earths in the world. That includes the People's Republic of China. I guarantee it. Okay. That's a coming attraction. We need uranium now. They've got a uranium mill. They need more processing time. That means they need a higher price for uranium. No idea what's the market for uranium. Uranium price has got to go up. That's the only way to save us. Energy Fuels is going to save us, all of us. Otherwise, you better invest in anti-kerosene petrol. Oh, I forgot. You're against fossil fuels, so forget the kerosene.
It'll have to be beeswax because you do realize most of the wax comes from non-organic sources. So accept beeswax. I think Cardinal Wolsey had beeswax candles. Very expensive. You'll get used to it. Or you may be seeing the dark. Oh, sorry. Am I done? Time up? Okay. Sorry. Yeah.
Hi, Jack. Have you heard anything about recycling of uranium from depleted uranium sources? There's a South African company that has told me about it.
It's a dangerous thing. Uranium recycling, rough. That is extremely expensive and dangerous. I mean, I guess you can do it. In fact, nuclear fuel reprocessing is a big business in France and Japan. Yeah. We stopped doing it because we're too smart to do it. The French do it, of course, for their second biggest fleet reactors in the world. The Japanese do it because they're bringing their fleets.
Okay. Another observation is, why wouldn't this market be a regular market? The uranium market, you're saying the price has got to go up. If there's little supply and there's a lot of demand, the price will go up.
I'm an engineer not a finance guy. You guys tell me the answer to that. I have no idea. I would think you're stupid, but who am I to say? I'm stupid. Who knows?
Time for one more last question.
I was sorry. It's more of a financial question, but it ties into everything you said. When you look at the stock price, it's been going down for a couple of years. When you look at, and even that's okay, but the companies last year lost like $37 million. How do you get the cash flow positive and by when?
If it were up to me, I'd sell the current inventory because it's profitable. Okay. I really press on things like developing that medical isotope business. I go forward as fast as I could in the rare earth business. I can't tell you the answer because I don't understand. Some learned people in this audience know a lot more about this than I do. I don't understand why their stock is low. I really don't. I get it that they're not making a lot of money. Okay. The potential is fantastic. It's so much better than so many of these juniors. I mean, a thousand times better. You have to understand what the company is doing and what the demands and needs are of the United States. People just don't pay attention. They don't know.
Got one last question.
Jack, can you give us any indication on the time to market on the medical isotopes? Okay.
Great. We are at time. And thank you, Jack, once again. Jack is available for one-on-ones later this afternoon.